Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited": Paradise Lost Or Paradise Regained?
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Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited": Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained? VALERIE KENNEDY It is worth asking why, in a secular and post-roman tic age, a myth of the Fall should have such validity. .. One answer, I think, is that the experience of being abandoned, of losing an unconditional love, and thereby of forfeiting the simple confidence and wholeness which it sanctions, is a common childhood tragedy. (Thurman 327) i. Introduction AJrideshead Revisited was first published in a limited edition in 1944, then in a revised edition for the general public in 1945, and then again, fifteen years later, in another revised edition, in 1960.1 The novel caused great controversy on its first appearance because of the striking changes it presented in Waugh's style and subject- matter.2 Previously known to his readers as a purveyor of ironic, apparently nihilistic black comedy and as a writer of no explicit moral or religious persuasion, Waugh emerges in Brideshead Re• visited as the author of a Catholic apologia whose dominant mode is that of realism. The novel traces the emotional, moral, and spiritual development of its protagonist and first-person narrator, Charles Ryder, through his relations with the Flyte family. As Waugh puts it in his i960 Preface to the novel, its "perhaps pre• sumptuously large" theme is "the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters" ( 7 ). In the first edition "Warning," he described the theme even more precisely as "the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world, in the fives of an English Catholic family, half-paganized themselves, in the world of 1923-1939" (quoted in Heath 163). The novel thus, in Waugh's eyes at least, is a mid-twentieth-century attempt to dramatize and "justify the ways of God to men."3 It is also, as this essay will argue, an evocation of the lost paradise of childhood and ARIEL : A Review of International English Literature, 21:1, January 1990 24 VALERIE KENNEDY youth, and it is the tension between the themes of faith and the lost paradise of youth which gives the novel much of its prob• lematic fascination. The explicitly Catholic intention of Brideshead Revisited has provoked much critical comment, most of it adverse. Edmund Wil• son was the first to articulate criticism of the novel as "a Catholic tract," calling the last scenes "extravagantly absurd" and accusing Waugh of mistaking Ryder's snobbery for religious faith (72 ). His criticism was swiftly followed by that of Donat O'Donnell (re• printed in Stannard 255-63 ). More recent critics of Waugh have expressed more balanced views: Robert Murray Davis has shown Waugh's careful revisions of certain scenes in the novel, Jeffrey Heath has offered a detailed analysis of the novel as a successful depiction of Charles Ryder's maturation and conversion, while Ian Littlewood has offered some more sceptical remarks about the novel, noting that Waugh's use of miracles is "likely to strike us as a kind of special pleading" (157), which he sees as unsatisfactory. The same critic also identifies a less metaphysical, more concrete source of the book's problematic fascination by suggesting that when the reader is called upon to accept Lord Marchmain's sud• den conversion and Charles's moment of revelation as miraculous events which do not follow the normal laws of logic, yet which cannot be questioned, he "becomes too aware of the fact" that he is being "practised upon" for the novel to be altogether convincing at this point. "Something," says Littlewood, "has gone wrong" (I57)-4 What has "gone wrong" in Brideshead Revisited, I would sug• gest, has to do less with the protagonist's conversion per se than with the author's less than total control of some elements of narra• tive technique and characterization. The novel is remarkable for the contradiction between its Bildungsroman plot, which enacts its Catholic message, and the emotional balance and structure of the novel. The Bildungsroman plot implies Charles's development and growing maturity: he must move from his immature love for Sebastian, with its implicit homosexual overtones, to his mature but extra-marital love for Julia, and finally to the calm satisfaction of his love for God. But the novel's emotional emphasis falls on the first stage of his development, his love for Sebastian, to the EVELYN WAUGH 25 detriment of the later stages. It is Charles's early love for Sebastian which is sensuously, comically, and fondly evoked, and which is both memorable and convincing. His love for Julia is much more summarily and less successfully treated, while his love for God is, perhaps by necessity, entirely absent from the text. The novel is dominated by the older Charles's memories of his love for Sebas• tian and his grief at its loss, both evoked through the recurrent image of the "enchanted garden" (32, 163) and the paradisal image of "those languid days at Brideshead" when the younger Charles believed himself "very near heaven" ( 77 ). One corollary of Charles's youthful love for Sebastian is his scep• ticism, which dominates the narrative to the almost complete ex• clusion of the faith of the older man, whose sparse retrospective comments (46, 83, 164) are too brief and inexplicit to act as correctives to his earlier self's scepticism.5 Moreover, when the nar• rative finally moves from scepticism to the assertion of faith, it expresses this faith not in the confessional narrative mode of the bulk of the novel, but through the metaphors of the "twitch upon the thread" (which gives Book Three its title), the rending of the veil, and the avalanche. The metaphors may be taken as Waugh's attempt to indicate a completely different area of experience from that treated in the rest of the novel, or, in Littlewood's words, "another order of things" (161). These metaphors break the spell of the earlier narrative. The strategy may well be intentional on Waugh's part, but its effects are somewhat ambivalent. Fur• thermore, Sebastian, Charles's first love, is, as Jeffrey Heath has observed, "so sympathetic a creation that Charles's other loves seem pale by contrast" (178). Despite his status as a "forerunner" and despite Anthony Blanche's attempts to warn Charles of the dangers of Sebastian's "charm" (51), the fascination which the latter exercises over both Charles and the reader is never dispelled, and the grief the older Ryder re-experiences upon narrating his memories of Sebastian and Brideshead twenty years later is seem• ingly not alleviated even by his newly adopted faith. The result of all this is that the emphasis of the novel falls on Charles's sense of grief and loss as he relives his own youth and his love for Sebastian, suggesting ultimately, perhaps, that he em• braces Catholicism in an unconscious attempt to regain, indirectly, 26 VALERIE KENNEDY the "paradise lost" of his experiences with Sebastian rather than out of religious conviction alone. The analysis of the novel that follows will examine, firstly, the conflict in the novel between scep• ticism and faith and, secondly, the role played by childhood in finking love and Catholicism in an attempt to identify the sources of the novel's paradoxical appeal. 2. Faith and Scepticism: The Problem of Charles's Conversion The predominant tone of the largely confessional, first-person nar• rative of Brideshead Revisited is both sceptical and sensuous. It is not seriously disturbed until the moment of revelation which comes to Charles at Lord Marchmain's bedside at the end of Book Three. The change of heart Charles experiences at this moment would seem to run counter to everything he has previously said in the novel about Catholicism. Moreover, it is expressed through meta• phorical language which, in trying to communicate a different order of experience, marks a break with the dominant tone of the novel.6 Charles's conversion itself is doubly problematic. Firstly, it occurs outside the text in the lapse of time between Lord March- main's death and the appearance of the older Ryder at the begin• ning of the novel; secondly, it is not made explicit until the novel's Epilogue. The very slight hint dropped in the Prologue, when Hooper tells the narrator that the Roman Catholic chapel at Brideshead is more "in your line than mine" (22), is easily over• looked, and the reader is likely to be extremely surprised (on a first reading of the novel ) when Ryder asserts his newly found faith in the Epilogue.7 The moment of revelation which Charles is presented as experi• encing at the bedside of the dying Lord Marchmain represents a problematic shift to a different order of reality from the one evoked in most scenes of the novel, where Charles has been characterized by his scepticism, rather than by his readiness to accept even the possibility of such revelations. Davis has observed that in revising at least one passage in the novel, Waugh makes Ryder "indifferent rather than actively hostile to or condescending towards religion" and thus "makes more plausible his movement into faith" (183). This is certainly true in relation to the passage Davis is discussing, EVELYN WAUGH 27 yet the point needs to be put into perspective. Although the com• ments on and criticisms of Catholicism early in the novel by such characters as Hooper and Jasper can obviously be discounted, since they merely reflect the meanness of spirit or the prejudices of the speakers (22, 28, 42-43), the young Charles's own comments on Catholicism are another matter. His initial acquaintance with the everyday application of Catholic rites like prayer and making novenas by Sebastian and Cordelia leads to comedy and even farce ; but most of all it reveals Charles's total lack of comprehen• sion of the Catholic faith (84-85, 91 ).